The Cold War's lost illusions

THE 1951 espionage trial of Julius and Ethel Rosenberg was one of the most contentious dramas of the Cold War, a rallying point for communists and anticommunists alike. But recent disclosures about the case ought to peel away some of the lingering illusions of both sides - showing how the tense period corroded values all around.

Included in more than 900 pages of grand jury testimony released Thursday under court order was material showing that Ethel Rosenberg, though aware of her husband's spying for the Soviets, did not play an active role in the plot. Her brother, David Greenglass, passed nuclear design secrets from Los Alamos to Julius Rosenberg. At the trial, Greenglass and his wife, Ruth, testified that Ethel Rosenberg typed up the handwritten notes Greenglass had made for the Soviet spymasters. This was the crucial testimony that implicated Ethel deeply enough in her husband's crime to send her to the electric chair in 1953.

The newly released documents show, however, that the Greenglasses told the grand jury that the notes they gave Julius Rosenberg were in fact handwritten. A half century later, David Greenglass admitted that he lied at the trial when he said his sister, Ethel Rosenberg, typed up his notes.

Confirmation that the Greenglasses told the truth to the grand jury but lied at the Rosenberg trial is contained in decoded Soviet communications of the period, known as the Venona files. Those files describe only handwritten notes.

The contents of the Venona files were known to prosecutors at the time of the Rosenberg trial. Frustrated that they could not present the top-secret Venona intercepts as evidence in court, and lacking other admissible evidence to prove what they had learned from the decrypted Soviet messages, the prosecutors decided to coerce the Greenglasses into committing perjury.

The prosecution's intent was to offer the Rosenbergs a choice: either give testimony that would help convict other spies the government knew about only through the Venona files, or accept a death sentence. The Rosenbergs chose to go to the electric chair at Sing Sing without incriminating others.

The shameful truth is that prosecutors trampled a value that was supposed to set a free society apart from Joseph Stalin's police state: the rule of law. Their betrayal differs only by degrees from the disloyalty of a convicted spy like Morton Sobell, who recently said of his belief in communism, "Now, I know it was an illusion. I was taken in."

The deceptions of the era, the totalitarian temptation, took in all too many victims on both sides of the Iron Curtain.